Wednesday, November 14, 2012

My article, which the paper titled "For GOP, Wooing Moderates a Self-Destructive Strategy," is in today's Lexington Herald-Leader. Of course, it's not about wooing moderates, its about listening to those in their own party. Oh well.

When one political party wins a national election and the other loses, the best thing for the losing party to do is take a lesson from what the winning party did. But moderates in the Republican Party seem to think it's a great idea to do exactly the opposite.

As soon as the election was over, moderates put the Republican Party on the political couch and began psychoanalyzing it to determine the problem. The advice they are now in the process of giving it is the same advice they have given the Party repeatedly over the last 40 years: Drop the social issues and nominate a moderate.

This, they say, is the key to realizing their electoral potential.

There must be something in the childhood of moderates' that prevents them from learning from their past mistakes--even those in the very recent past. What they should have noticed, but apparently haven't, is that this is exactly what the Republicans did this year and it didn't work.

3 comments:

KyCobb
said...

I just read this article saying that Romney got 79% of the white evangelical vote, the same as Bush 2004, and evangelicals were 27% of the electorate, the highest ever:http://news.yahoo.com/evangelical-disaster-happened-religious-vote-135118940--politics.html

So despite Romney apparently maxing out the white evangelical vote, Obama won the election, winning Catholics, Jews the young and racial minorities. As someone said, GOP men need to quit talking about rape as anything other than a violent, horrific crime, and I doubt there is much future in opposing same-sex marriage or contraception. I expect that opposing abortion will remain a central issue for the GOP, but they need to figure out how to talk to single women about the issue without making them feel like the GOP thinks they are a bunch of ho's.

Here is another way the GOP could tweak its message. It can be very pro-marriage without being anti same-sex marriage. 5% of the voters identified as LGBT and they broke big for the President. Even worse, 6.4% of young voters identified as LGBT. While they may be too liberal to be reached by the GOP, they have straight family and friends who would be more receptive to the GOP message if it wasn't so aggressively anti-gay. Would "value voters" abandon the GOP if it promoted pro-marriage policies but dropped its support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage? Its doesn't even have to endorse same-sex marriage, but just say leave it up to the states, the GOP position on many issues. The GOP can drop the hostility to LGBT people, and thereby broaden its appeal with centrist straights, without abandoning its pro-marriage values. The real threat to marriage isn't whether the small LGBT community can marry, but whether heterosexuals will get married. Focusing on gays seems to miss the big picture.